Another painter turned filmmaker: Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker, grew up in a rural suburb of San Francisco, the only child of a librarian and the manager of a paint factory. “My dad used to draw these great cartoon figures. His dream was being a cartoonist, but he never achieved it, and it kind of broke my heart,” she says. “I think part of my interest in art had to do with his yearning for something he could never have.” She studied painting at CalArts, then moved to New York for a fellowship from the Whitney. Bigelow initially immersed herself in the downtown art scene, working on performance pieces with the conceptual group Art & Language, but she soon began experimenting with film. A master’s in film criticism from Columbia left her in love with foreign directors such as Passolini and Fassbinder. Then one night she went to a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch, and had an epiphany. “It took all my semiotic Lacanian deconstructivist saturation and torqued it,” she says. “I realized there’s a more muscular approach to filmmaking that I found very inspiring.” (via Newsweek)

Two Coats of Paint is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To use content beyond the scope of this license, permission is required.

Connect With Us

Miami: A different place than last yearContributed by Sharon Louden / Thank you, Sharon Butler, for giving me the opportunity to be a guest contributor from the art fairs in Miami Beach this week. I started with Pulse ...

Art fairs: Satellite and NADA, 2016Contributed by Sharon Louden / On Friday, I spent almost three hours at the Satellite Art Fair and returned for another half hour on Saturday. It was like having about 20 studio ...

Godward and upward at SLAGContributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Ben Godward is at home with bright colors and exotic shapes. The New York sculptor has for some time been producing boldly optic, resolutely asymmetrical ...

Karen Pence is a painterYes, Indiana's First Lady Karen Pence likes to paint. Pence told the Indy Star that she studied art at Butler, where she majored in teaching and minored in art. "I ...

Invitations: Miami and ParisI have two shows opening this week: A solo show (S-105) curated by Robert Yoder/SEASON at the PULSE Contemporary Art Fair and the Paris iteration of “Deux Côtés / Two Sides,” at Galerie Jean Fournier. This ...

Thank you, ShirleyThe following text is Raphael Rubinstein's moving remembrance of Shirley Jaffe, which he read during the October memorial service for Jaffe at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The images are courtesy of Tibor de Nagy, Jaffe's ...

Subscribe VIA Email

Sharing content

Two Coats of Paint is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Contact Sharon Butler via email for permission to use content beyond the scope of this license.